


The Heart Box

by Wallpaper



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: American Civil War, CLAMP, Civil War, Gen, Other, Wallpaper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-29
Updated: 2011-11-29
Packaged: 2017-10-26 16:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallpaper/pseuds/Wallpaper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In one world they met, briefly.  (Kurogane + Syaoran, brotherly relationship.  Civil War AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Heart Box

**Author's Note:**

> Title: The Heart Box
> 
> Author: Wallpaper
> 
> Rating: PG13
> 
> Pairings: no main couple, background Syaoran/Sakura
> 
> Word Count: 5,511
> 
> Genre: Drama, Friendship, War Stories
> 
> Tropes: au counterparts, character study, teen, troubled past, puppy love
> 
> Warnings: graphic depictions of the results of violence
> 
> AN: Written a few years back, republished to this account. Sorry for any historical inaccuracies.

Kurogane Suwa lived in the North when the war finally started, and did not hesitate to join in the lines of those preparing to fight. A gun was placed in his hand, and for three months he slept, ate, and lived away from his sisters in a wind-bent tent. He rose before the sun, as did the other boys, and like dark shadows they would trek through the woods in the morning. Mist made the world surreal and simple, and the morning's cold seemed to emanate from their bones. Lungs clutched the first breaths of early air before releasing them in brief milky fogs that hovered around the lips.

To wake them up they were each given coffee, black, and with grinds still floating like algae on the dark surface. It stung Kurogane's mouth with its heat and flare of bitterness, but Kurogane found he liked it. Even the air tasted sweet on his tongue after drinking that coffee.

The boy next to him, scarcely tall enough to see over the table, made a face the first morning, scrunching up a small nose and a wrinkle forming between wide brown eyes. Kurogane chuckled darkly, and the boy looked up at him.

"You're going to have some trouble with the hard work if eating breakfast puts you in that amount of pain." Kurogane said, and he tore off half of his grainy biscuit, shoving the thing entirely into one cheek.

The boy blinked, his expression blank. He tilted his head to the side very slightly, uncombed brown hair falling over his face. One eye glistened dully, unseeingly.

"What?" The boy asked. He seemed genuinely confused, and Kurogane raised his already arched dark brows.

"The coffee. Cowboy coffee, they call it. You looked like you were in pain."

The boy frowned, his eyes narrowing. "It didn't hurt. It just tastes like crap, is all." He spoke with the complete indigence of a child wronged, and Kurogane snorted.

They ate in silence for another moment, Kurogane taking his time to chew. The boys on either side of them talked and chattered about this and that: a fight that was happening later today, girls they wrote to, practice, how many old, half broken glass bottles had shattered under their devoted shooting… Kurogane's mind had already began to  
wander far away, to other things, to a young sister back home…

"You can have it, if you want." The boy said.

"Huh?" Kurogane spoke through a mouthful of the last of his biscuit.

"My name is Li Syaoran." The boy said eagerly, and then blushed. "I mean, my coffee. You can have it, I suppose. As long as you give me your water."

There was another silence, and Kurogane turned the food over in his mouth.

In all of the month and a half he had spent here, he had not really spoken to anyone. A rare few had made some half-assed attempt to engage him in conversation, but with his lack of responses and clear disinterest in their lives back home, which was, anyway, all anyone spoke of here: each conversation would dwindle away.

And Kurogane found, with a slight wound to his pride, that he was very tired of the silence.

"Here." He said flatly, and he pushed the tin cup brimming with relatively clear liquid over to the boy, who held it with both hands as he brought it to his lips. His knuckles were bruised, the bulge below the index finger pulped over with grained brown scab. Kurogane reached over and lifted the boy's –Li Syaoran's- coffee cup to his lips and drank, the bitterness flaring on the back of his tongue and the blackness of it seeming to almost tingle against his teeth as it stained them.

It did not take Kurogane long to realize that by the short exchange of words between himself and Syaoran, he had been awarded his own personal shadow. It took Kurogane only a minute longer to realize with surprise that really, he didn't care. Syaoran did not speak obsessively of home and the battlefield and women, the three favorite topics of the other boys. The only topics, it seemed, actually.

Syaoran instead would engage him in very much one sided conversations about 'archaeology,' which seemed to interest him to no ends. The campsite of the training grounds they were on had apparently been an Indian village, back before the move. In the morning, as the boys fluttered from tent to tent, some faces still slick with shaving soap and weapons out for polishing and cleaning, for this time and any other break they received Syaoran would follow Kurogane, occasionally picking stones from the ground like a child plucking flowers.

"You see," Li Syaoran said, and he lifted the stone, dirt ridden and sharp edged, for Kurogane to look at. Kurogane had to lean over to see what was between the dirty thumb and finger- the boy really was quite small. And Kurogane's older sister had been worried about him being too young.

"No. " Kurogane answered bluntly, admittedly half interested.

Li Syaoran smirked, excited. "It's a broken piece of pottery. It's covered in dirt, but you can still see the paint underneath. These things are everywhere!"

And then Syaoran was off, practically vibrating with excitement over the find.

Kurogane himself didn't particularly see the glory of it. He was half-Indian himself, as were many other boys at the camp, as well as a few full-on Indian boys who simply didn't live on the lands. Why get excited about dead Indians when you've got real ones all around you?

It excited Syaoran though, and Kurogane would watch him finger the pieces of one hundred year old clay, the pads of his fingers delicate and uncalloused and careful, and Kurogane would worry about whether those fingers would be able to pull a trigger when the time came.

The camp moved, and Syaoran had to say goodbye to his dead Indian village, filled with the ghosts of days past, the broken pieces of the bowls they ate from, and the old arrows that sun bronzed fingers had released into the hides of the wild animals.

They went through a town during the move. Half the boys had crowded the small stores and shops, excited as never before over things like candy and eggs when they had spent such a lengthy time lacking them. There was a section in one shop near the back with an assortment of dolls, their pale ceramic faces beaming unchangingly, rosy painted lips tiny under miniature noses and painted eyes.

Syaoran wandered through that section, and he lifted one thing after another. Kurogane followed, wondering vaguely if he should get something for his younger sister, Tomoyo.

Li Syaoran suddenly let out a slight noise of exclamation, and he reached back on the shelf, behind the fluffed dress of another painted doll, and pulled out a tiny box. It was wooden, but lined with soft velvet fabric on the inside, deep red like the outer skin of a cranberry. The tiny fuzz of it became paler when Syaoran ran his thumb over it. He drew a swirl in the box's inner plumage.

"Aw, don't tell me you've got some girl back home too, do you, kid?" Kurogane said, very slightly teasing and half exasperated. It really did seem as though everyone had some petite thing in a dress to write back to in this camp. Not that he was jealous. It wasn't that Kurogane hadn't had any girl who perhaps wanted him to write to her, he just hadn't particularly wanted to himself.

Strange, though. He had never heard Syaoran talk about anyone.

Syaoran's face flushed as red as the inner lining of the box, and he shut it quickly. The outside was painted, a deep heart and two doves, trees formed with a delicate hand and a ribbon binding the doves together.

"N- no…" Syaoran said unconvincingly.

Kurogane snorted, and pretended not to notice that Syaoran bought the box, and he pretended not to notice that later, as they trudged along, Syaoran took the box from his shoulder bag and held it as delicately as he had the piece of pottery with a look on his face that seemed to hold all the softness and innocence of the world.

"I don't know if you can do it." Kurogane said bluntly, one day. Syaoran was in his tent; sitting on the ground with a paper flattened against the cover of a thick book, ink brimming in the bottle delicately placed beside him. The quill in the boy's hand stayed, and he blinked up at Kurogane.

"What do you mean? Do what?" He asked, and his head tilted ever so slightly to the side again. And again, the sightless eye glistened dully, not squinting in the bright light that emanated from the lantern beside him.

"Kill. Fight. I don't think you're built for it, no offense."

There was a prolonged silence, and then Syaoran sat up slowly. He placed the book with the letter on top carefully before him, the paper already half filled with his precisely scribed scrawl. The quill was set against the binding of the book, the ink-sodden end hanging over the edge so it would not stain.

"I will fight, because I have to." Kurogane's eyes didn't leave Syaoran's, and Syaoran smiled an almost sad smile, not false in either emotion- bittersweet in the way his lids lowered slightly.

"I know you don't like talking about back home. I remember you complaining about all the boys being obsessed with the girls they write to." Syaoran said slowly, and he almost hesitantly dug into his pocket and produced the tiny box, the stained wood deeply dark and the picture standing out vibrant in the lantern light. The paleness of the doves, the heart like a sun, and the ribbon binding them all together. Trees like separate horizons.

"She isn't back home though. She and her family moved down south, right before it all… went down." Syaoran finished, that same sad smile still on his face.

Kurogane said nothing, and Syaoran kept looking down at his heart box, his expression soft and the bittersweet smile still there. "I know I can fight, even if maybe any fighting spirit wasn't supposed to be in me, or something."

"Why? You're fighting against the place she lives in."

"I asked her to marry me when we grew up, and she said yes. I asked her when I was 8."

Kurogane let out a gruff sigh that might have been a growl. "Well how old are you now, Kid? 9? 8 and a half?"

"12. How old are you?"

Kurogane's eyes narrowed, searching for sarcasm. Finding none, he replied gruffly, "Fifteen."

"So," Syaoran said matter of factly, "It doesn't seem like either of us are going to fight for a few years, anyway. They don't let kids fight in wars anymore. At least not much."

"I lied about my age."

"Yeah, me too."

Kurogane started. "Who'd have believed you’re old enough?" He said.

Syaoran shrugged, still admiring the heart box. "I don't think he did. The man I signed up with, I mean. But I had to do something- even if I can't really fight yet, I can prepare for it. I couldn't lie and say I was 16, though. No one would believe that. I suppose you did?"

"I said I was seventeen."

"Oh." Syaoran said, and a rather lost look of surprise flitted across his face as his gaze was drawn, finally, away from the heart box. "So I suppose you'll be going out to fight, soon. When you're done training here."

Kurogane nodded curtly, and then continued. "But you're still not making any sense. Why is having a girl who lives down south making you want to fight against the south? Are you hoping to see her?"

Syaoran shook his head, and that bittersweet smile curved across his mouth and made his lids heavy again. "No. I know that's not possible. It's for peace, between the world around her home and the world around mine. I don't want her to live in a different country. Lincoln is fighting for peace, peace and unity."

Kurogane snorted. "Yeah. All right. Whatever." But he did not tease Syaoran at all, or even seem to look down on him. A soft "Hn." Escaped him as he thought, eyebrows drawn together and gaze directed at the ceiling, as though considering it.

They did not mention it again, though it did comfort Kurogane. It made it relatively easier to picture a weapon in the boys hands, a weapon ready to fire at another man instead of the bottles or squirrels they practiced on. Some part of him knew those childish, delicate fingers could find blood, if need be. But he couldn’t imagine that face in violence the same way it was easy to imagine his fellow fighters. Their potential for bloodshed seemed written into their skin, the delicate webbing mapped out where they would crack when they needed to pull those triggers. He could only ever imagine a violent intent in Syaoran’s face if he stood before something. Before a precipice. Before a girl, faceless, waiting for his world to be hers.

It was an odd mental image.

"I'm going to teach you to fight." Kurogane announced one day at breakfast through the sticky oatmeal filling his mouth, and then he swallowed grandly.

Still clutching his cup like a child, the tin still pressed to his lips, Syaoran looked up at Kurogane with his wide brown eyes. The boy lowered the cup and his head tilted a fraction of an inch. "What do you mean? Not that I don't appreciate it and everything, but isn't that what they're doing here already?"

"Naw. They teach you to kill a bottle, or a rodent or something here. I'm going to teach you to kill a man."

Syaoran's eyes widened, and his face paled considerably. The cup was placed upon the table as delicately as if it were an explosive (or a piece of ancient pottery. Or a heart box. Or a letter to some nameless girl down south who might never read it, if this keeps up).

"You've killed before?" He questioned, and his eyes stayed trained on Kurogane's eyes as if to catch a glimpse of his blood in the veins of the whites.

"Yes." He said shortly. An emotion that took Kurogane almost a moment to recognize flashed almost eagerly across Syaoran's face, and Kurogane finished quickly, "It's nothing to be proud of. Sometimes you have to. War, you should probably already know, will be one of those times." The moment of awe passed, and guilt flickered in Syaoran's wide, innocent eyes. A hand dug itself into the deep pocket of his pants where Kurogane knew the heart box always resided, and the fingers of the other hand picked at the food on the plate.

"How will you teach me to kill?" Syaoran asked slowly. The stale bread was pressed against the lump of cold oatmeal, dragged through it, and Syaoran's eyes stayed on the trench he dug.

"The terrifying power of imagination." Kurogane said flatly, and Syaoran looked up at him. An eyebrow was raised, a single brow, and it took Kurogane a moment to realize why this expression he had never seen Syaoran make seemed so familiar- he did the same exact thing when questioning someone.

Syaoran continued to look at him like he was insane though, with the expression that Kurogane was half bemused and half uncomfortable to recognize as his own, and Kurogane decided to elaborate. "Trust me. It works."

Well, it didn't clear much up. But it at least made Syaoran look back at his breakfast, shaking his head slightly as a grin pulled at the side of his mouth.

~

"There are people around you, your brothers in arms. The heart box is in your pocket, and you can feel it there. You, yourself are terrified, because I know you will be. It's your first big risk, going through uncharted enemy territory: but the heart box is there, you can feel it against your leg, and it calms you a little. Breathe slower. Listen past the footsteps of your comrades, like your general does, with his head tilted to the side, his ear searching for a betraying sound.

"The two beside you are talking; speaking in voices so hushed you can scarcely hear them at all when you aren't concentrating; about home, and they're bitching about how cold the morning is, how the air still tastes like snow, even though it's not close to winter yet. You're driven to distraction, you're not listening to anything anymore because you wouldn't be able to hear footsteps over their chattering anyway, and surely, out of the group, someone must be listening. Someone would alert the rest.

"Your group comes to a clearing, and there are arrowhead stones in the dirt. This used to be another Indian village.

"And from the darkness comes a shot-“

And Kurogane pounded one sharp stone against another, hard enough for it to chip, beside the milky shell of Syaoran's ear. The body trembled only slightly at the crack, as though trying to contain the inner layer, which had jumped in fright.

"From the trees, the shadows outside the brightness of the clearing, comes a shot and then there is blood on your face, a wave of red before your eyes. The man next to you collapses and the outer shell of him is broken. There is blood on his head and it spreads on the ground, but you don't have time to really realize this because the air around you is suddenly alive with the whirring of bullets. Your general barks an order, and in a flurry you and the rest of the men scatter between the trees, and wood splinters on all sides of you. Wet bark from a dead trunk of an old tree explodes, and someone again cries out as another bullet meets flesh.

"Orders are being shouted, and all of you try to follow them. Those around you are firing at those who have fired first; everywhere hot metal is slicing the air. The man who hated the cold air that tastes like snow is dead, lying chest down on the leaf carpeted floor of the forest with his ear against the dirt as though listening to the ground. You can hear them yelling behind you and you cannot keep hiding behind the tree you've leapt behind. They are approaching, fast.

"Running out from one tree to a fatter one, farther back, you fire twice in their general direction before running, but even you know it is too high to hit any mark. Go.”

Syaoran, obediently, lifts his gun high so it points almost to the tops of the trees before them and he fires twice. His limbs are stiff, expecting the crack though the story has still left him tense and he is still surprised by it, if only slightly. His eyes are tightly closed and they make a starburst of wrinkled lines on each edge of his face.

Li Syaoran was not particularly frightened yet, though he had stopped being amused at the exercise devoted to training to kill that Kurogane had devised. His mouth was a rigid line, a sealed gash across his face.  
"You find yourself behind the tree, but there was already someone there, someone you didn't see. The man leaps back, startled by you, leaps out of the protection of the tree's body and he is shot quickly."  
There is no trace of amusement anymore, and Syaoran is still rigid and unmoving.

"You press yourself to the back of the tree, you feel the withered bark of it, unique as a finger print in design, against your back. You press your back hard enough against it that you think there might be a mark. You imagine, as bullets hit the other side of this tree and are stopped, that you can feel a tiny earthquake in the trunk every time the metal buries itself inside.

"But you have not been paying attention. From behind, the soldiers are advancing again and you have to run. You stumble, though, over the body of the man you frightened. He turns over slightly, and your legs are still over him and you pull away too quickly, and they have advanced far enough. There is the eye of the end of a gun pointing at you, and you roll over and you scamper.

"Another tree is before you, and you fling yourself behind it. You can see the others who fought with you and trained with you falling back, flinging themselves bravely out from behind trees to fire. One of your comrades, for a mad instant, aims his weapon at you before quickly turning it when he sees your uniform.

"And then there are feet running behind you again, on the other side of the tree.

"The man that circles around has sandy blond hair, it falls damp with sweat over his eyes. His cheeks are bristled and unshaven, though he's scarcely older then you. His eyes are bright though, brown eyes, widely spaced. A crooked nose. Glasses, perhaps. He's small in stature. He is wild with fear, he is more scared then you are, but he lifts the barrel of the gun-"

Syaoran's face is twisting now, twisting slightly, and slowly his own gun lifts even as Kurogane continues speaking.

"His stance is slightly off, but the gun still points easily at your chest, and around you the world is still screaming with fire and howls of pain, of plundering footsteps stampeding. He is ready to fire, but you must fire first.

The gun trembles in Syaoran's hands, hands that are now clutching with a kind of force that would shatter the pottery, that would crack the heart box's thin wooden lid, crack it through the painted heart, break the ribbon connecting the two doves, the trees' intertwining branches.

"Your eyes shut, and it seems as though all is silent. You see nothing, but you can remember the man's face. It is clear before you, the sweat pouring over it. He has a folded paper in his front breast pocket, a letter, maybe.

"He is ready to fire, but you are too. You fire first. Go."

There is not a sound.

"It's all for peace, so you can keep your promise. This boy with the letter must-"

There is a crack, a crack in the darkness. Through the forest, at exactly the height of a man's chest, a bullet whizzes onwards until it finally hits some tree, somewhere. The shot echoes. The shot stands alone, and it holds more meaning then the two that had originally scared the birds away. There was no following noise- all animals in the vicinity had already fled.

Syaoran slowly opened his eyes.

"Do you really think that will work?" Syaoran asked.

Kurogane looked down at him. The eyes looked almost mismatched in the dim afternoon light, one filled with the old dull spark and one looking almost like a vacant window of an abandoned house, nothing behind the surface. There is something in his brows, though. The eyes do not seem quite as big. They do not shine like they used to, and seem to fit into his face. There is something darker in them now, darkened with the simple knowledge of how the true loss of innocence, when it does come, might go.

"Perhaps." He answered honestly. "I thought it would, since you can imagine those stories of the dead guys so well."

Syaoran remained silent.

He did not ask Kurogane if he had made up the story or if he knew it.

He did not ask Kurogane whom it was he had killed.

He did not ask why.

~

It is in the very early morning, when only a few are up, when the attack does come.

Bullets split the air, and in the tent that Syaoran sleeps, he awakens quickly and reaches instinctively for the heart, the heart box, and clutches it with one white knuckled hand, scab peeled away long ago and old bruises gone.

In his tent, Kurogane reaches instinctively for his gun.

~

There is a bullet lodged in Kurogane's left arm. The dead litter the ground, and when it is like this, the color of the uniform is not seen. They are not the south or the north, they are the dead. The dead and dying on the dirt.

There is a bullet lodged in Kurogane's left arm, yes. His fingers on that hand have stopped moving, and black flecks are filling the tips of them beneath the membrane of finger-skin he used to use and feel things with. Though Kurogane has wrapped his torn shirt tight around his arm to stop the bleeding, there is the eternally despised feeling of fear churning in his stomach. It is more terrifying that he does not feel the wound, as though his brain has blocked the waves of unbearable pain that should at this moment be hitting him. It probably has. This, though, is not the reason he has surrendered, and it is not the reason they are being led to the enemy camp with guns at their back.

Syaoran does not walk; two men carry him on an army stretcher. This is the reason Kurogane has surrendered.

Blood is pooling in the side of Li Syaoran's small stomach, though a cloth is being pressed to it. His face is ashen, the boy's limbs are jerking, and the eyes switch and flicker between being squeezed shut and being wide. Wide and gaping like mouths, shimmering equally. Kurogane does not remember how he ever saw a lack of innocence in them.

Li Syaoran needs medical attention, and Kurogane had wondered when he sat at the boy's side on that battlefield, whether it was possible that the medic on their side survived. No one had been prepared, and there had been so much death, so much death, and it had been so sickeningly familiar…

Though his one good arm is being held fast and the barrel of a gun is hard and cold against his back, Kurogane glares. No eyes even bother to meet his, though. The livid spirit, the inhuman glint of blood darkening his face and seeming to seep into his eyes: they have seen it all before.

When they reach the enemy camp, Kurogane and the few others who have been taken captive are herded like sheep into a medical tent. The few cowards who Kurogane remembers hiding in their own tents behind him, those cowards who never fired a gun at all, are dismissed quickly and taken away. Kurogane glares at them stonily as they leave, and none meet his eyes.

"Over on the bed." He is ordered, and with the same too common and still too frightening glare Kurogane lets himself be led. His arm is a dead thing at his side, unreal because as he thinks to move it, it still remains limp and unresponsive. The tips of the fingers are dotted with the blood congealed under his skin, veins failing. The top where the arm still bleeds where the bullet hit it and white bone stands out like bloodied stars in all the crimson flesh, still pulses. He cannot feel any pain though, and is unnerved when the medic, after forcing the good arm upwards and chaining it to the bedpost, prods the end of a tool into the arm and he still feels nothing. The medic clicks his tongue, and moves on to Li Syaoran, who is still gasping on the bed next to Kurogane.

They have not bothered to chain Li Syaoran to the bedpost. His eyes shimmer with fever, and his wound is being cleaned. The boy's gaze flickers desperately, searching for something to cling to…

Kurogane shuts his eyes. He could still see the boy, looking so tiny against the shadow of the enemy, gun like a toy in his hands. Kurogane had not thought to assist him, it was an easy shot. Kurogane had assumed he had succeeded and that Li Syaoran could kill if he had to, if only because of that glint in the boy's eye that had not spoken at all of innocence.

But Syaoran's finger had stayed, and no bullet cracked the air, not one that was his, anyway.

"Cousin!" Kurogane's eyes snapped open, and Syaoran's wavering gaze had found something to cling to. With effort, Kurogane turned. His tied arm and chained hand made it hard to move, but when he did, for half a moment he found himself looking into the face of Syaoran.

He blinked. No, now it became clearer. The boy for an instant had looked to be Syaoran's identical, the same brown hair and wide eyes, the same expression of surprise and suppressed horror that were twisting the wounded boy's features. He even appeared to be the same height, this Syaoran look alike.

But at a second glance the resemblance lessened. The hair fell in the same way, was the same color, but it was different in the part of it, slightly. The face was harsher, and this boy was taller. Eyes were mismatched, one a brown that looked almost like Li Syaoran's, the other a bright, feverish blue.

The affect was sickening, somehow. These eyes looked on with a crazed gaze, but there was a hundredth of a softening in that gaze as it fell on Li Syaoran, the boy who had called him 'cousin.'

The boy stepped forwards, and for the first time Kurogane noticed the limp form at his side- another boy was there, one Kurogane knew only by sight. The 'cousin' had the boy by the scruff of the collar, and the face turned as he was pressed uncaringly into the waiting hands of another medic.

Fair blond hair fell down over the slit of a golden brown eye, the other a gouged hole of blood. From the slash to the side it looked like a bayonet wound, from the lack of even wounded eye it looked like torture. This fair-haired boy's breath was coming in shaky gasps as he sucked at the air desperately, and Kurogane felt something in his chest tighten. Anger, a livid uncontrollable anger he had felt only a few times before, and his gaze stayed locked on this cousin of Li Syaoran as the odious monstrosity before him made his way towards the bloody child on the bed.

He could not really explain it. It was all war, these people fought the same way his army fought, and there was no proof at all that this 'cousin' was the one who had tortured the blond haired boy bleeding on the bed, a boy he didn't even know, really. But livid anger reared in him, and he simply knew he did not want this 'cousin' to approach the much too innocent child beside him.

He struggled against his bonds, but it did no good. He glared though, as the boy with the sickening gaze lowered his head slowly, facing Syaoran, and Syaoran's arm twitched. Glared as if his own simple eyes meant something.

The 'cousin' made no move to help Li Syaoran as the arm struggled with the pocket, before quivering once in it's grip and the fingers rose.  
The heart, the painted heart box was clutched in Li Syaoran's trembling hand. He reached it forwards, and his mute cousin did not move to help him. Syaoran's hand moved as though the depth of things were changing before him, and in offering the box to his cousin he almost poked out the shimmering blue eye, though the cousin did not even blink. Finally, a hand lifted and took the box in one hand and Kurogane found himself surprised that there was not blood on it. That there was not blood on the mouth, though he could not say why, and hatred still quaked in his bones.

That vacant gaze examined the box, mouth unmoving, half disinterested.

"Give… give it to her, please. Tell Sakura that I- I will keep my promise." Syaoran struggled with the words, and then breathed one deep breath before relaxing into a still fitful unconsciousness.

Medics bustled, healing the bodies of those who fought against their own armies. More prisoners were brought in, and the blond haired boy was shackled before medical attention was brought to him. Not a single soul had glanced up, even as Syaoran shouted "Cousin!" the first time. It was, after all, normal for families to be separated by this war.

The 'cousin' stared up at Syaoran for a moment before rising, box in hand. For a moment, just a moment, he did look like Syaoran- exactly like him, besides that blue eye. But no, it all came back to the eyes.

There was nothing of Syaoran in those hard, cold eyes.


End file.
